Ideally, your laptop should be set up with PHP 5.3 and MySQL and a working copy of my ZF1 tutorial. It would be a good idea to have a vhost set up on http://zf2tutorial.localhost or similar. Ability to create additional vhosts may come in handy. The PHP cli tool should also work as you'll need to run some php scripts from the command line.

I'm going to be covering ZF2's autoloader, dependency injector, event manager and then we'll go through the current Mvc prototype. We'll also be doing some exercises if we have time.

I'm looking forward to it and hope you are too!

I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at the next Day Camp 4 Developers on 1st October.

Day Camp 4 Developers is a one-day online conference run by our friend Cal Evans and is now onto its 3rd outing. An online conference is one that you attend in your own home (or office!) which keeps the costs down considerably, so you have no excuse not to buy a ticket: just $40!

Day Camp 4 Developers is unusual in that it it concentrates on the "soft" skills that a developer needs in order to do their job well. The topic for this Day Camp is Project Management which is something that every developer should have knowledge about. Even if you aren't a project manager yourself, understanding what it is and why it helps is vital for your career development in any team based undertaking.

I'm talking on how we manage projects in my company. The idea is to give you an idea of the things that have to be done in order to take a proposal through to a live website as there's more to it than just writing the code. I've found that now that all of our team here understand the project management side of the job, the whole process goes much more smoothly and more profitably for everyone. Hopefully I'll be able to help you understand what your project managers are doing during their day too!

On the day before tek started, playing mini-golf with Helgi, Ian, Kathy, Rafael & Lorna was fun

It wouldn't be a trip to Chicago without pizza!

I loved Liz's hat

Lig had a two-hands-one-mouth problem...

The social events at tek are great. You can usually find Liz enjoying the party!

It was always fun to see groups showing off some cool tech or another to each other. In this case, I think Lorna and Matthew were discussing using LaTeX for presentations

Jeremy took great pictures too and also posed on the couch

I think the funniest moment of tek11 was when Ian read us excerpts from Page & Didday's Fortran 77 for Humans he found on the shelf at Potbelly's. Lunch will never be the same again.

Looking at this set of photos, you'd think that all we did was party. In fact, I also went to a number of amazing sessions where I learnt stuff, but I was so busy paying attention, I didn't take any photos during those times. I had a great time at both DPC and php|tek this year and if you haven't been to a PHP conference, then I recommend that you go to the next one you can!

The full set of photos is up on Flickr.

I finally managed to snag a good picture of Juozas!

Harrie was an excellent DPC host.

Aral gave an excellent keynote and was around for the conference. He had us in stitches when trying to tweet from an Android phone!

On the hallway track, David wasn't shy about sharing his opinions on web services!

It was great catching up with Lig, who wore the best t-shirts!

Finally, the best photos I took at DPC were both of Cal:

The full set of photos is up on Flickr.

More importantly, this year there's a tutorial day on Friday 7th October which is also very cost-effective at £330 for the tutorial day and the conference.

There's a great set of tutorials:

• Rob Allen on Zend Framework 2 (that's me!)
• Marcus Deglos on Drupal performance and tools
• Arne Blankerts on Security
• Lorna Mitchell on Web services
• Stuart Herbert on Maintainable applications in PHP using components

Obviously, I'm slightly biased, but I think that the Zend Framework 2 tutorial day will be great! ZF2 is so new, I'm not sure exactly what we'll be covering. My plan at the moment is to cover a few key topics in depth, so that you really understand them and be confident that you can develop new ZF2 applications going forward.

Head on over to the tutorial day page and buy a ticket now :)

If you're planning on attending the tutorial, I'm interested in what you'd like to see covered; let me know.

I travelled to Belgium with Ryan Mauger on Thursday and we had a poor journey that took around 12 hours to get there. Our first flight (10:45) was cancelled, and then the second flight (16:45) was delayed until 20:15 or so. On the plus side, I got to spend all day in the bar with Bittarman!

On arrival at Brussels, the famous PHPBenelux hospitality kicked in as Michelangelo was waiting for us to give us a lift to the hotel. I had heard about how hospitable this conference was to their speakers and having now experienced it, I can confirm that their reputation is well deserved. As a result of the travel problems, I missed the speakers' dinner, but managed to get in a drink (or two!) in the bar.

Friday, the first day of the conference, was tutorials first appeared well attended. I spent a bit of time in the morning going over my deployment presentation which was useful. The conference started at 1pm with a keynote by Lorna and Ivo. This was a good keynote providing many ideas on how to become a better developer and I took away a number of ideas that I need to explore. I was then up with Stress-free deployment which I enjoy giving as adding a deployment strategy to our company was so beneficial that I like to tell everyone! The rest of the afternoon also had interesting talks and I need to call out David Zülke's talk on REST which was very helpful.

After the closing keynote, there was a social in the hotel bar which was well attended and I got to talk to many interesting people and again, stayed up much too late!

Day 2 dawned bright and sunny and I managed to miss the first session whilst catching up with email. I did get to Scott's talk on HipHop and then I was up with a look at what's new in ZF 2. I didn't manage to get across my enthusiasm for ZF 2 as well as I should have though and will do better in future as ZF 2 is going to be great! I visited the hallway track after lunch and watched several people clone Joind.in and start looking at bugs which was exciting. Keith Casey was then up with a look at project triage which was a fascinating insight into how to get a handle on a "legacy" project and turn it into something to be proud off.

The conference was closed by Elizabeth's keynote on community. Elizabeth is an enthusiastic and inspiring speaker and I'm very proud to be part of the PHP community and will do my bit to keep it strong! Obviously, after the conference, we put this into practice with a meal and then a few more drinks in the bar...

PHPUK, the conference organised by the PHP London usergroup is being held on Friday 25th February 2011. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, then you should!

I'll be there talking about optimising a Zend Framework application, which should be interesting. I'm going to be looking at what's slow in the ZF code itself and have been profiling using xhprof which is the first time I've used it. It's quite good, once you have it set up :)

There are a lot of good talks at PHPUK this year and I'm particularly looking forward to Thijs Feryn's Varnish in Action and Jonathan Weiss' Running on Amazon EC2. Check out the full list of talks.

If you are going, then come and say hello.

The full list of talks is on their website and shows that this is going to be a great conference. I'll be giving a talk that will introduce Zend Framework 2 and look why it has been created and what's different compared to ZF1. Other speakers include Nick Belhomme talking about namespaces, Markus Franz on Doctrine and Mike van Riel on SCRUM. There will even be a few of our friends from across the pond with Keith Casey talking about handling large unfamiliar codebases and Paul Jones talking about benchmarking.

If you can make it to Belgium in January, grab one of the early bird tickets. and plan to learn much!

The day started with Lorna's keynote on how to improve your skill set as a team. This was a great talk which sparked a number of ideas for me and no doubt many others there.

I spoke on the upcoming Zend Framework 2.0 this time and judging from the comments on the joind.in, I covered the topic well. If you were at the talk and haven't rated, I'd appreciate it if you could jot down your thoughts on what I did well and what I did badly, so I can improve. The slides are also available on my talks page.

I particularly enjoyed Marco's talk on the systems that run php|architect which looked at how they have organised their code into separate systems that makes it easier to swap different bits out as required. I then joined the "ZF track" with Rowan's talk on Zend_Acl which was comprehensive with particularly good examples! I then caught Juozas' talk on Optimising Zend Framework which was a high level look at the issues within ZF1 that make it slower that we'd like.

The final session of the day was the Framework Shootout chaired by Marcus Deglos. I joined the panel with David, Sam and Derick and answered questions from Marcus. David did, of course, steal the show as he's a highly entertaining, knowledgable speaker with a great sense of humour.

All in all, an excellent day with a good second day at MOSI, though I only managed to see Thijs' talk on PHP from a hoster's perspective which was entertaining and informative.

I'm looking forward to PHPNW 11 already!

It's a one day tech-agnostic conference containing 5 sessions and all you need is an Internet connection. Good choice of speakers too: Josh Holmes, Elizabeth Naramore, Scott Gordon, Brian Prince and Lorna Mitchell.

Details

Date: Saturday, November 6th
Price: $35 per person ($30 in groups of 10 or more)
Where: On-Line (gotowebinar.com)

What's also cool is that all sessions will be recorded and available for you to review at your leisure. Of course, if you're busy that day, then you can buy a ticket and get the videos anyway to listen to at a later date. Apparently, you'll be able to buy the session recordings after the event, but at a price premium, so probaly worth just getting a ticket and not (virtually!) turning up on the day :)

You can buy a ticket directly via eventbrite now and be sure of your place!